Wrong intelligence focus

There is a long paper by Carlotta Pavese (via OLDaily) talking about skills that are theoretical or intellectual vs. those that are practical and embodied. I agree that the priorities of education in developing intelligence are questionable, but I don’t think it is sufficient to just change the extension of the concept of intelligence. Rather, we should be aware that there are other mental qualities that don’t align with our Western modernity’s ideal.

Images: both from Wikimedia

The paper contains useful distinctions of various characteristics of what we call intelligence. Intelligent behavior is typically seen as goal-directed, flexible to circumstances, and adaptive according to previous experiences. Characteristics that seem to be especially intelligent, are thinking, executive functions, cognitive control, knowledge and cognitive architecture, and abstraction.

Several of these fit the idea that the human mind exists to manipulate the world rather than understand it to coexist with it: goal-direction, executive, control. Perhaps less obviously, the kind of thinking discussed in the paper is productive thinking, about how to do things, and has a product as a goal. And the generativity of thinking is based on its recursivity and its hierarchical structure — which entails collapsing and nesting.

Now of course I have to acknowledge that the traditional ideal of intelligence, with emphasis on theoretical and intellectual skills, does have a merit. A simple reason is that it helps being better prepared for an unknown future, and in particular, being able to cope with the invisible (future is invisible). But the mentioned attributes of ‘flexible’ to circumstances, and ‘adaptive’ according to previous experiences, do not address unknown circumstances and future experiences. And the mentioned ‘knowledge and cognitive architecture’ (mainly the assumed ‘declarative’ compartment of knowledge, which also entails more ‘sapere’ than ‘cognoscere’) does not promise long-term sustainable benefit.

So what remains, ‘abstraction’, does indeed play a very special role. For one thing, practicing to deal with abstract ideas also helps getting used to coping with the invisible. And abstraction may help to create indirect solutions that don’t solve a single concrete problem directly but many arbitrary problems indirectly.

A second benefit is that abstraction may help to transfer insights from one domain into another. But this effect is also achieved by a different kind of generalization: by metaphorical thinking. And while metaphors apply to two or multiple concrete situations, abstractions apply to none. And this is IMHO why abstractions are not everyone’s taste, and glorifying the abstract variety of thinking excludes many people.

So I think the focus on goal-directed, hierarchical, abstract thinking for manipulating and dominating the world, is missing out on a lot of valuable mental contributions of a wide range of cultures that are not trimmed to what Western competition calls ‘intelligent’, such as, like, indigenous ways of knowing, or care perspective.

The paper talks about ‘intelligence elitism’, and of course the common understanding of the term intelligence implies a scarcity of the individuals who possess a lot of it. Which, in turn, likely promotes unfairness simply by game-theoretical ‘power of the few’. But democracy is able to overturn this by the power of the many, and to decide that everyone shall be treated equal, no matter if they are ‘created’ equal. So I think it is not necessary to try to extend the concept of intelligence. Instead, awareness is needed of how limited this notion is, and that other mental qualities might be much more beneficial for an unknown sustainable future.